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Meta Reveals New Prototype VR Headsets Focused on Retinal Resolution and Light Field Passthrough

August 1, 2023 From roadtovr

Meta unveiled two new VR headset prototypes that showcase more progress in the fight to solve some persistent technical challenges facing VR today. Presenting at SIGGRAPH 2023, Meta is demonstrating a headset with retinal resolution combined with varifocal optics, and another headset with advanced light field passthrough capabilities.

Butterscotch Varifocal Prototype

Revealed in a developer blogpost, Meta showed off a varifocal research prototype that demonstrates a VR display system which provides “visual clarity that can closely match the capabilities of the human eye,” says Meta Optical Scientist Yang Zhao. The so-called ‘Butterscotch Varifocal’ prototype provides retinal resolution of up to 56 pixels per degree (PPD), which is sufficient for 20/20 visual acuity, researchers say.

Since its displays are also varifocal, it can support from 0 to 4 diopter (i.e. infinity to 25 cm), and matching what researchers say are “the dynamics of eye accommodation with at least 10 diopter/s peak velocity and 100 diopter/s2 acceleration.” The pulsing motors below control the displays’ focal distance in an effort to match the human eye.

Varifocal headsets represent a solution to the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC) which has plagued standard VR headsets, the most advanced consumer headsets included. Varifocal headsets not only include the same standard support for the vergence reflex (when eyes converge on objects to form a stereo image), but also the accommodation reflex (when the lens of the eye changes shape to focus light at different depths). Without support for accommodation, VR displays can cause eye strain, make it difficult to focus on close imagery, and may even limit visual immersion.

Check out the through-the-lens video below to see how Butterscotch’s varifocal bit works:

Using LCD panels readily available on the market, Butterscotch manages its 20/20 retinal display by reducing the field of view (FOV) to 50 degrees, smaller than Quest 2’s ~89 degree FOV.

Although Butterscotch’s varifocal abilities are similar to the company’s prior Half Dome prototypes, the company says Butterscotch is “solely focused on showcasing the experience of retinal resolution in VR—but not necessarily with hardware technologies that are ultimately appropriate for the consumer.”

“In contrast, our work on Half Dome 1 through 3 focused on miniaturizing varifocal in a fully practical manner, albeit with lower-resolution optics and displays more similar to today’s consumer headsets,” explains Display Systems Research Director Douglas Lanman. “Our work on Half Dome prototypes continues, but we’re pausing to exhibit Butterscotch Varifocal to show why we remain so committed to varifocal and delivering better visual acuity and comfort in VR headsets. We want our community to experience varifocal for themselves and join in pushing this technology forward.”

Flamera Lightfield Passthrough Prototype

Another important side of making XR more immersive is undoubtably the headset’s passthrough capabilities, like you might see on Quest Pro or the upcoming Apple Vision Pro. The decidedly bug-eyed design of Meta’s Flamera research prototype is looking for a better way to create more realistic passthrough by using light fields.

Research Scientist Grace Kuo wearing the Flamera research prototype | Image courtesy Meta

In standard headsets, cameras are typically placed a few inches from where your eyes actually sit, capturing a different view than what you’d see if you weren’t wearing a headset. While there’s a lot of distortion and placement correction going on in standard headsets of today, you’ll probably still notice a ton of visual artifacts as the software tries to correctly resolve and render different depths of field.

“To address this challenge, we brainstormed optical architectures that could directly capture the same rays of light that you’d see with your bare eyes,” says Meta Research Scientist Grace Kuo. “By starting our headset design from scratch instead of modifying an existing design, we ended up with a camera that looks quite unique but can enable better passthrough image quality and lower latency.”

Check out the quick explainer below to see how Flamera’s ingenious capture methods work:

Now, here’s a comparison between an unobstructed view and Flamera’s light field capture, showing off some pretty compelling results:

As research prototypes, there’s no indication when we can expect these technologies to come to consumer headsets. Still, it’s clear that Meta is adamant about showing off just how far ahead it is in tackling some of the persistent issues in headsets today—something you probably won’t see from the patently black box that is Apple.

You can read more about Butterscotch and Flamera in their respective research papers, which are being presented at SIGGRAPH 2023, taking place August 6th – 10th in Los Angeles. Click here for the Butterscotch Varifocal abstract and Flamera full paper.

Filed Under: AR Development, butterscotch, butterscotch varifocal, flamera, flamera prototyle, Meta, meta prototypes, News, varifocal prototype, VR Development, vr prototypes

Meta Optimizes Quest Developer Tool for Apple’s Mac M-series Chips

February 1, 2023 From roadtovr

Last week Meta released the latest version of the Meta Quest Developer Hub tool which has been optimized to work natively on Apple’s M-series chips for better performance.

The Meta Quest Developer Hub (MQDH) is a collection of tools to make VR development easier for Quest developers. In addition to giving devs an easy way to manage their headset and the files on it, it also provides access to Meta’s various VR SDKs, and includes tools to profiling and optimizing VR applications.

While MQDH has supported MacOS since it launched back in late 2020, the latest version v3.2, is just now getting around to supporting Apple’s modern M-series chips which the company uses in all of its most recent computers. The tool now has native support for the ARM64 architecture of the M-series chips, improving booting time and performance.

It’s a somewhat curious update considering this is the only major change in MQDH v3.2, and considering that VR developers working on MacOS seem to be a tiny minority compared to those on Windows.

There’s no telling exactly why Meta chose to do this now—rather than say, months if not years ago. Possibilities range from the insignificant (perhaps a handful of Meta’s internal VR devs work on Mac and wanted the extra performance) to the strategic (maybe Meta wants to improve the experience of Mac VR developers in an attempt to sway them away from Apple’s long-rumored headset.

Filed Under: mqdh, mqdh m1, mqdh m2, mqdh mac, mqdh mac os, News, News Bits, VR Development

Unreal Engine 5’s New Rendering Tech is Beginning to Make VR Look Startlingly Real

October 19, 2022 From roadtovr

Unreal Engine 5 brings two key features which stand to radically improve the realism of both 3D geometry and lighting. While the features aren’t yet fully optimized for VR, early developer experiments are showing impressive results.

Unreal Engine 5 launched earlier this year, but unfortunately its two new key features—Lumen for global illumination lighting and Nanite for micro-geometry—weren’t supported for VR out of the gate.

However, Epic has been working on subsequent versions of of Unreal Engine 5, and though they aren’t ready for a full release yet, preview builds of Unreal Engine 5.1 and 5.2 show that Lumen & Nanite have gained initial support for VR.

And while there’s still likely progress to be made to fully optimize the features for the level of performance required by VR headsets, developer have begun experimenting with Lumen & Nanite in VR and the results are already quite striking.

One such example comes from Twitter users Hiroyan which dropped themselves into a cave full of richly detailed objects and a flashlight to light up the space.

The Epic gods have done it again… Lumen and Nanite in #UnrealEngine #VirtualReality using #UE5-main (5.2). This is by far the most detail and realism I have ever seen in #VR. pic.twitter.com/KE9aYboJTE

— Hiroyan (@H1R0Y4N) October 9, 2022

While many Lumen demos have focused on showing crazy glowing balls and highly reflective surfaces (as a clear example of what Lumen actually does), it’s actually this much more subtle use of the technologies that—to me, anyway—looks the most convincing from a realism standpoint.

The thing that really makes this scene stand out is the interplay between the highly detailed geometry and the lighting. VR really benefits from more detailed geometry not only because the stereoscopic view makes it readily apparent when small geometric details are actually faked (using tricks like normal mapping), but also because it’s so much easier and more common to get really close to objects when you’re playing in VR. Not only can you pick stuff up and hold it right up to your face, you can lean your head infinitely close to any surface.

Thanks to Nanite—which essentially functions like a continuous LOD system that draws detail from the original ‘master’ 3D model—the tiny surface details on the rocks and wood really stand out, especially because they’re real in terms of stereoscopic depth.

And thanks to that, the Lumen lighting system properly catches all of those small surface details and shines on them in a very convincing way that also subtly lights up the rest of the scene without pushing reflections to unrealistic levels simply for demonstration purposes.

“It’s hard to convey through screenshots, but it’s truly amazing when you’re able to get super close up to objects and they have micro detail you can see with your own eyes,” writes Hiroyan.

Images courtesy Hiroyan

While it will be awesome when this level of detail is possible on a basic VR ready PC, that might not happen for some time. Hiroyan says this demonstration was running on Nvidia’s RTX 3090, one of the highest-end GPUs the company makes.

Filed Under: News, ue5, ue5 lumen nanite vr, Unreal Engine 5, unreal engine 5 lumen nanite vr, VR Development

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